It's incredible the lengths humanity is willing to go to avoid adopting nuclear energy - despite the US navy driving mobile reactors millions of miles over the last 70 years.
Reality is solar isn't viable everywhere. And it's not optimal to put it in places where you use the sun to grow food.
We should follow a holistic approach.
* Wind where it's windy.
* Solar where it's sunny - ideally on buildings/away from farms.
* Hydro where possible.
* Nuclear where it makes sense, i.e. stable geography, low occurence of natural disasters, lots of land.
* Some natty gas plants for overflow - not saying commission new ones or prioritize natty, but it's sensible to utilize existing peaked plants.
I'm not a big fan of large scale battery storage solutions, but they can work sometimes. I think they're more sensible for residential/commercial use and, when paired with solar, can really help add robustness to the grid. But, for mega energy storage, I think hydro based solutions are more sensible.
What do you base all these claims on? Plenty of papers show Solar + wind + storage is viable practically everywhere.
Also there is a ton of research on planning energy systems and what technology mixes make sense. This stuff has to be economical. Energy costs are measured in percentage of GDP. Simply liking nuclear doesn't make it viable. Especially in a world with PV meaning you can't sell energy during the day.
There really is only one macro fact that will shape the energy system of the future: The price of PV modules is now effectively zero in rich countries. Everything else has to be judged by how well it complements/makes use of free energy during daylight hours. The geopolitical implications of this haven't even begun to be explored.
Energy independence and a mix of technologies isn't just about cost. It's about redundancy and how you're positioning yourself to handle various unexpected events.
You don't want a state primarily on solar if you get a super cell darkening the sky for a week.
You want a mix of renewables, but you don't strictly want to rely on the food graces of mother nature at all times.
Boiling things down to just price is a very simplistic view.
You seem to think this contradicts my statement somehow?
Obviously you want a tech mix, and obviously anyone working in the field is taking the dunkelflaute or other extreme events very seriously. That's where storage comes in, and that's where the biggest unknowns and needs for future development are (e.g. is seasonal H2 storage really feasible). But to pretend like nuclear can magically become cheaper through technical breakthroughs, while storage is an unsolvable problem is disingenuous.
It's also disingenuous to suggest that random fluctuations in weather are somehow a unique problem. Sudden unscheduled maintenance can take down nuclear plants as well. As can the weather: Nuclear power plants require cooling and can be shut down due to weather and climatic conditions, too [1].
> I analyse climate-linked outages in nuclear power plants over the past three decades. My assessment shows that the average frequency of climate-induced disruptions has dramatically increased from 0.2 outage per reactor-year in the 1990s to 1.5 in the past decade. Based on the projections for adopted climate scenarios, the average annual energy loss of the global nuclear fleet is estimated to range between 0.8% and 1.4% in the mid-term (2046–2065) and 1.4% and 2.4% in the long term (2081–2100).
> But to pretend like nuclear can magically become cheaper through technical breakthroughs, while storage is an unsolvable problem is disingenuous.
I didn't say storage was not solvable and I even gave a better storage solution than your silly "batteries" example.
> Based on the projections for adopted climate scenarios, the average annual energy loss of the global nuclear fleet is estimated to range between 0.8% and 1.4% in the mid-term (2046–2065) and 1.4% and 2.4% in the long term (2081–2100).
From your own linked article - do you think this energy loss is even close to comparable to solar for similar conditions? You've linked an article but don't seem to understand the point they're looking to make.
Anywho, I don't think you're looking to argue in good faith and seem to have an anti-nuclear agenda, despite talking about an "energy mix". Save your policies for whatever echo chamber they were derived from, thanks.
PV is not heavily subsidized compared to other energy carriers, and the learning rate has been extremely consistent for a long time.
LCOE takes some of the system costs into account, but it's of course true.
And your second sentence is not how energy markets actually work. Of course I make a contract for reliable supply, but I don't contract with an individual power plant. I contract with an energy company and that buys from the cheapest supplier mix (aka merit order).
The long term contracts for base load run for years, but those, too will eventually have to adpat to the reality of abundant cheap daylight energy.
My main point with PV isn't about the system we have right now. It's that we are in the first days of a new system structured around the new technological reality that only recently emerged. Until very recently nobody, even the optimists, expected PV to get that cheap that fast. It will take decades for the repercussions of this phase transition to shake out. The issue is, due to climate change we don't have decades.
Great question! Mostly, because I forgot. Second, it's pretty expensive for the gains you get - I'd rather favour it for use in heat pumps; but it makes sense for some regions.
In what way is it not? It has a budget and a mission. Economics are a huge part of their existence. Far more is spent on health care every year over the Navy.
The US Navy has other, very high priorities to balance against cost - national security, global security, freedom, peace, trade, the lives of billions, the lives of its own personnel. The US military may the largest budget of any organization in the world.
At the same time, they invest in those mobile nuclear reactors only for specific needs: attack submarines, ballistic missile submarines, and aircraft supercarriers. They calculate that the benefit of effectively unlimited fuel supply is worth the cost for those ships. The submarines can stay submerged for months at a time and have extensive range, and the carriers can move through the ocean, displacing 100,000 tons of water, to anywhere on the globe without worrying about the logisitcs of the enormous amount of fossil fuel it would require.
Why do we have to be constrained by economics unlike the navy? The state within the state has access to nuclear powered ships so it is just a question of widening that capability to the members of the state living outside the walls of the keep. Not a matter of establishing precedent or anything. That part is done and long proven. The federal government even has experience managing water and power for entire geographical regions today.
I haven't seen any data that backs that up based on general principals. Most of the cost is in artificially-imposed operational requirements - however well founded.
Also, remember that nuclear, unlike solar, has a lot of room for improvement still, both in how it's done, and how it's regulated. Solar has already been tremendously optimized, while nuclear has not.
The cost argument seems to be advances by the same people who impose or support the additional operational requirements, and who also just have a philosophical aversion to nuclear power.
There are hundreds of nuclear power plants already in operation, many decades old. There have been only a very small number of minor accidents (3 come to mind: Chernobyl, Three mile island and Fukushima), in which only a few dozen people were killed. Nuclear, even using old technology, has proven to be far safer and better for the environment than any scalable alternative, including solar. New designs are even safer.
Calling Chernobyl a minor accident is insane. We are lucky it wasn’t worse but even then most of Europes forests are still polluted from the fallout. People directly killed during the incident is not a great indicator of incident severity when we're talking about environmental pollutants.
Nobody died from installing asbestos insulation yet here we are.
> Most of the cost is in artificially-imposed operational requirements
Indeed. Once there was a wonderfully efficient, economical nuclear reactor design, better thermal efficiency than PWRs, could be refueled during operation, considerably cheaper to build… However, nobody is THAT keen to build more Chernobyls.
(The RBMK design really was quite impressive, provided you weren’t too concerned about, well, safety.)
The economics of nuclear energy are difficult, today. So much of the cost is upfront that getting the investment is problematic; unless you have a guaranteed price per kWh, it really is a huge gamble.
All I see is people with an aversion to solar and wind, that champion nuclear for purely ideological reasons. The aversion seems to be mostly driven by the fact that solar and wind were first championed by eco hippies, and some people seem to find it hard to bear that the eco hippies were right in this case.
Nuclear has had tremendously more cumulative R+D spend than solar and wind. The notion that it's less optimized is absurd. And this is where your bias shows: we have empirically proven persistent scaling laws for solar and batteries. We also have seen nuclear become ever more expensive over time. Yet you claim that these trends will come to an end, and in the case of Nuclear will suddenly completely reverse themselves without any evidence.
To also bemoan the burdensome operational requirements while championing it's safety record is internally inconsistent.
And in the end no one has so far actually built a place where you could store the nuclear waste long term, and the costs of long term storage are not even fully factored into the costs of today's nuclear power plants.
"All I see is people with..." - Maybe some do, but not me. I think solar is great, and wind too. I have solar panels on my roof that cover most of my family's usage. Geo would be awesome, and hydro can be great.
I'm all for doing more, and improving our lot incrementally over time. Let's focus on doing more wherever we can.
Why is nuclear getting more expensive over time? Are we forgetting how to produce it or something? Actually we've been finding more efficient and safer ways to produce nuclear for decades, but we impose - as I said - artificial burdens that make it more expensive, or simply don't allow it at all. At least in the US.
The operational requirements DON'T make it more safe though, they just add cost. Storing nuclear waste is also safe, easy and cheap - if we allow it to be so.
Seriously, that's good to hear. I really often encounter arguments that seem heavily ideology driven.
Do you have some sources for operational requirements not making things safer? And as far as I know there are plenty of fusion concepts in the lab, but very few that have actually been explored at the full reactor scale. If you have any pointers on recent developments in that direction I would also be curious to take a look.
But then I also have to ask why nuclear? Why not methanation (or hydrogen if storage becomes feasible) and gas power plants or some more sophisticated version of that? That has much better complementarity to solar. And it typically is preferred to nuclear by energy system models wherever seasonality is strong.
Also I haven't really seen any proposals discussing long term waste storage. Again do you have any sources that discuss this?
Nuclear has had a century almost to hone its craft.
I'm a lftr fanboy, but nuclear had its time to optimize.
I can't believe you're calling Chernobyl "minor". Go take a vacation there if you disagree.
Anyway, nuclear is not cost competitive in the real world, imo it never will be with solid fuel, nor will it be safe. Certainly not with standards like yours.
Solve the waste problem and you solve nuclear. Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!)
I used to have a neighbor who worked for the DOE, all of the viable solutions are blocked by people who don’t want it in their backyard. Can’t really move forward until that is solved..
> Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!)
The correct solution: put it into dry casks and do nothing right now. Store it simple underground storage facilities or on the grounds of active nuclear power plants.
The casks are fine for the next 300 years, and during that time we can either:
1. Perfect the nuclear fusion, it will provide plenty of neutrons to transmute the waste.
2. Perfect fast fission reactors. See above.
3. Use some of the excess of too-cheap-to-meter green energy for accelerator-driven subcritical fission reactors.
4. Yep, use rockets to slowly launch the waste into space. We can already design a storage capsule that can survive re-entry.
In any case, we have literally hundreds of years to come up with a solution and there are many viable paths.
Yes. We're _already_ launching nuclear waste into space, in the form of RTGs with Pu-238. So there's been a lot of work towards making them passively safe, although the weight constraints for deep-space craft necessarily limit the amount of achievable safety.
> Even if a capsule could survive reentry, surely it wouldn't survive impact.
It'll be moving at a terminal velocity, and can be engineered to not fragment on impact.
For example, I remember reading about a proposal to alloy the nuclear waste elements with a carrier metal like iron or nickel, and then cover them in an ablative graphite shell.
>Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!)
Could the waste be 'sent' into space?
Bonus points for sending a certain human with it.
Serious question, though.
This was one of the Soviet Union’s proposed use for Energia (a super-heavy launcher which flew precisely twice before the Soviet Union collapsed). In practice, there would be, ah, challenges; no launcher ever built is reliable enough that anyone would be particularly comfortable with _launching large amounts of high-level nuclear waste_ with it.
> Could the waste be 'sent' into space? Bonus points for sending a certain human with it. Serious question, though.
Would you want a RUD of nuclear waste in the atmosphere? That's the key thing with sending stuff to space, we are nowhere near close enough in terms of reliability and cost to what would be needed to send the stuff away.
By "space" do you mean low earth orbit - where the stuff will reenter the atmosphere within (say) a century? Or geosync orbit - where it'll stay up there forever-ish...but ain't actually gone? Or actually gone, like (say) Mars?
IIR, the current rock-bottom (Falcon 9) launch prices are something like $1,000/lbs. to low earth orbit, $2,500/lbs. to geosync, and $6,500/lbs. to Venus.
A quick Google says the US has about 88,000 tons of radioactive waste. So - 88,000 tons = 176,000,000 lbs. = $176,000,000,000 just to put it in low earth orbit. And something like 4,600 Falcon 9 launches. (Some fraction of which would doubtless go badly wrong, spreading radioactive stuff all over the landscape.)
In short - it's a cool-sounding idea. But neither the numbers nor the politics are remotely near viable.
Lftr is supposed to be in the high nineties allegedly of fuel consumption %.
And the gas/liquid nature means separation and processing is a lot more viable
Contrast that with solid fuel rods using like 20% of its fuel, and that only of the fissile uranium isotopes. The the waste is locked in a solid form of the spent fuel rods
I'll take lftr which (theoretically) is so much cleaner.
Fusion isnt without waste, the high speed neutrons irradiate/transmute the reactor
Burying the waste is an excellent solution. We are currently dealing with the much more dangerous problem of hydrocarbon combustion waste by releasing it into the atmosphere.
What problem with the waste? Reactors are working and generating power today for many thousands of americans. Whatever is being done with waste today seems to work well enough to continue reactor operations without any major headlines. Just seems to be a bit of cognitive dissonance here between what is claimed online and what we see today out in the field generating power.
Current waste takes tens of thousands of years to stop being radioactive. Until then we need to hide it from all living life. In the meantime we continue to create waste.
We are getting better shrinking from thousands to a single thousand.. but we still create waste while we argue where to store the new waste.
Many countries would have to buy nuclear fuel from other countries much like they do for gas and oil. On the other side very few countries can build their own solar panels so it seems the same sort of problem. However if you accept to depend from potential hostile countries at least solar panels don't do much harm when they fail and it takes very little effort to install the equivalent amount of power of a nuclear power plant. If we only could all get along and have a global power grid with always 12 hours of sunshine on it.
Until we solve the storage problem, the manufacture of batteries required to store solar power at night and during other low generation times is actively doing harm even without failing.
I don’t think this invalidates your point but I do think it is incredibly important to recognize that environmental harm done slowly over time is no less impactful than that done by a disaster.
Unfortunately the arrangement of the continents would require undersea transmission lines for this. Would be an interesting future where the Bering Strait is the most valuable real estate on Earth for the American-Euraisian grid connection. But more likely we would build fusion reactors or get over our nuclear phobia before building something like that.
Most country that can invest a few hundred million can build their own solar panels that will be significantly cheaper than existing and future fossil fuel prices. It's just those panels will be 2x+ the price of those produced in China. So can't compete in the free market.